“My object has not been to write a text-book on firework-making, but rather to trace the art from earliest times, and to give a description of the development and process of manufacture… My excuse for adding another volume to the literature of the art is that I am of the eighth generation of a family of pyrotechnists, whose work, I venture to claim, has not been without its effect.”
– Alan St. H. Brock, aka ‘The Firework King’, Pyrotechnics: The History and Art of Firework Making
In Pyrotechnics: The History and Art of Firework Making (1922), Alan St. H. Brock, owner of C.T. Brock & Co. fireworks factory at Cheam, England, tells us the history of firework design and creation. The company, which began as Brock’s Fireworks in Islington, north London (not far from rival Pain’s Fireworks), was bought by Standard Fireworks in 1988, which soon after was bought China-based Black Cat Fireworks.
The book comes in two parts – the first chapters concern the history of pyrotechnics and firework manufacture; the second deals with classifications of fireworks and their display. There are also six fabulous coloured Japanese prints of fireworks made by by Messrs. Hirayama of Yokohama and 29 black and white printed plates.
The book includes a word on the author’s life and death, which came in a cable to the New York Times:
July 14, Arthur Brock, for fifty-six years head of the famous family of fireworks makers, died today at Chesham Bois, Buckinghamshire. His age was 80. The Brock family has been making fireworks for 218 years and staged the famous Crystal Palace shows. During the World War Arthur Brock turned his factory over for special government war requirements. His son, Wing Commander P. A. Brock, who was killed at the storming of Zeebrugge, where he had charge of smoke screens, was co-inventor of the bullet used to destroy several Zeppelins and the “Dover flare,” a successful antisubmarine device.
Mr. Brock made 20,000,000 fuses for bombs “without a single failure,” he claimed.
In Gunpowder & Glory: The Explosive Life of Frank Brock OBE (29 June 1884 – 23 April 1918), we learn that having been raised in the family firm, Wing Commander Brock set his mind to the development of artificial smoke and fog. He also developed the Brock bullet at his family’s factory and at his own expense, a standard SMLE .303 round tipped with the contact explosive potassium chlorate.
After all that blowing up and detonation, the book includes to a ditty, the Ode to Madame Hengler, “Firework-maker to Vauxhall” By Thomas Hood:
be bright and busy
While hoaxed astronomers look up and stare
From tall observatories, dumb and dizzy,To see a Squib in Cassiopeia’s Chair!
A Serpent wriggling into Charles’s Wain!
A Roman Candle lighting the Great Bear!
A Rocket tangled in Diana’s train,
And Crackers stuck in Berenice’s Hair!
We’ll end with a hand-tinted film of the Brock’s fireworks dispaly at London Crystal Palce in 1904:
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